How about if question upvotes were only worth +5 rep instead of +10? And this was applied retroactively? (answer upvotes would be unchanged from the current behavior, so this would be question specific.)

This seems to be a better solution to the particular "shore, there is always gold" problem without all the rather serious negative repercussions of increasing the punitive value and/or cost of downvotes across the board.

I don't think that it's the solution but it's at least a solution.
–
perbertMar 19 '10 at 4:02

3

Or, better yet, just don't give any rep for questions at all. Completely disincent users from repeatedly asking questions that have been asked a dozen times before, and let the answers to real problems be the question's reward.
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Lawrence DolMar 19 '10 at 7:54

5

@software questions definitely have value; placing them at +0 is not correct IMO. We're cutting the value in half which is a pretty big change.
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Jeff Atwood♦Mar 19 '10 at 8:05

14

@Jeff, what would be really really cool would be to see a before/after graph of number of users per reputation, once you've finished the recalc.
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BenjolMar 19 '10 at 8:24

7

@Jeff, how about putting Alert bar on everyone on SO when it starts (like when you did on moderator voting), saying that "There's going to be Reputation Changes and Recalc anytime soon, and You could lost up to 50%", to prevent extra claims about their reputation lost?
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YOUMar 19 '10 at 10:13

1

@s.mark that's like inviting people to email us, or inciting a riot.. better to let those that care contact us, and we'll refer them to either here or the blog
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Jeff Atwood♦Mar 19 '10 at 10:17

26

Maybe there could be a notification that says "thank you for being a valuable member of the stackoverflow community for over a year. -500."
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user27414Mar 19 '10 at 13:11

4

Ouch, I just reached 10k rep but I feel like I'm going to loose a lot of rep and access to moderation tools :'(
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marcggMar 19 '10 at 14:17

2

@Jeff, I was a few days away from 10k on Meta, now I'm hosed.
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Lance RobertsMar 19 '10 at 16:44

38

It's a little disingenuous to ask on Meta "Should the weight of question upvotes be reduced?" then 5 hours later you announce on the blog that you are doing this. 5 hours that were in the middle of the night for most North American and European users of the site, no less. Why even bother with the pretense of having a discussion when you don't allow time for people to make their counterpoints?
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KipMar 19 '10 at 17:59

13

And especially, what was the point of asking us what we thought about change #2 if we said we didn't like it and then you implement it anyway? Hell, it's your site and you can do whatever you want but I suggest in the future you just do it without asking if you're not really interested whether we agree or not.. At least it's more upfront
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Andreas BoniniMar 19 '10 at 18:20

3

This hurts normal users (like me) who ask good well thought out questions. I have felt a part of the SO community for a while now, but I feel I am getting smacked in the face on this one. Good Questions are the bread and butter of SO. Find a way to punish bad questions, not questions in general!
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VaccanoMar 19 '10 at 19:24

2

It's much harder to get 30 votes on a question than it is to get 15 on an answer [edit for numbers: SO currently has Good Answer x 8k and Nice Question x 10.8k]; why should the easy one be worth more? This change may make sense for questions that get one upvote, or two upvotes and two downvotes, but it doesn't seem to work as well with actually good questions.
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mmyersMar 19 '10 at 20:10

2

@mmyers: I think the point is that it takes very little effort to ask several hundred middling questions and accumulate +1 - +3 on each one (even though it might look like 2 downvotes followed by 3 sympathy upvotes). For a net gain of hundreds, even thousands of rep.
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Lawrence DolMar 20 '10 at 1:32

17 Answers
17

I'm fine with that. Something that's bugged me for a while is that while I don't mind helping out by editing poorly-asked questions, it seems wrong that some users come to rely on this, coasting through asking one lousy question after another, occasionally garnering significant amounts of reputation post-cleanup.

...Although to be fair, I have almost nothing to lose if this suggestion is implemented...

I have always agreed that there is a substance to this concern, particularly observing the type of users who tend to benefit from it.
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Jeff Atwood♦Mar 19 '10 at 2:32

You could counteract this by giving points to the editor. The details of this though.... I don't know.
–
uɐɯsO uɐɥʇɐNMar 19 '10 at 3:03

4

@George: yeah, that's been suggested before... IMHO, it's a can of worms best left unopened.
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Shog9♦Mar 19 '10 at 3:15

3

@George: Significantly outweighed by potential abuse and difficulty of implementation to avoid it. I don't mind editing to improve the question/SO without getting rep.
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GnomeMar 19 '10 at 3:16

@Shog9, I have a "suggested improvement" feature functioning just fine on my CT, if anything I wish more people would suggest more improvements, I even created a Kaizen badge for people with tons of approved improvements. The only slight annoyance is that it can take a while for your change to go live.
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wafflesMar 19 '10 at 5:55

1

This change nails the good questions and the bad ones equally. SO is hurting what gives it life. For questions (mine at least) upvotes are the reward for taking the time to make it usable not only by me, but by someone who hits it from Google. If we are going to hurt all questions instead of finding a way to just get the bad ones, then all questions will suffer.
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VaccanoMar 19 '10 at 19:40

1

What will be the point (rep based at least) to taking the time to make a great question when a mediocre/poor one will get you your answer. There are enough people answering questions out there that one of them will likely say the info you need. No need to worry about those that come after, there is no rep in it for you. Get your answer and get back to life. (I do not like this attitude, but that is what this change is encouraging.)
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VaccanoMar 19 '10 at 19:40

1

@Vaccano: well, you still get rep, just not as much. And unfortunately, there are already a lot of people with that same attitude - frankly, I'm not all that confident in the motivating ability of rep when it comes to asking good questions, since as both you and Jeff note, the real rewards for asking questions are the answers themselves. IMHO, the best part of asking a good question is the good answers that tend to result from it - whether that's sufficient motivation remains to be seen...
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Shog9♦Mar 19 '10 at 20:25

But ... it also punishes some non problem users quite harshly, dbr, michael stum, you and me would be hit with a 12% reputation penalty. Which is odd, cause overall I think the questions I ask on SO are pretty good and if anything we need better questions on SO.

Thanks for putting numbers to the issue. As someone affected by it, does it really feel like punishment or is there some "questions were slightly overvalued, and this corrects that"? Either way, also as someone significantly affected, do you think it would be an improvement to SO?
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GnomeMar 19 '10 at 5:49

1

So now I'm a "problem user" ? I have no problem with the change, I will probablly still use SO as I do today. For me, it's an invaluable tool for finding answers, and I rarely have the time to post answers (very rarely there's a question that my skills alone can help. Usually there are dozens of people ready to write answers, so I don't feel this is hurting/leeching the site).
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ripper234Mar 19 '10 at 8:04

1

-1 for incorrect figures - your calculation ignores bounties/downvotes. The later are negligible for most users, but the former are not.
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CasebashMar 19 '10 at 8:13

Glad I'm not in that top list! I think I'm going to take quite a hit for this as well, though I don't think I've often asked questions that weren't for a real problem I needed to solve.
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BenjolMar 19 '10 at 8:21

1

Wow - I'm on a list higher than Eric Lippert, it must be wrong! ;)
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ShuggyCoUkMar 19 '10 at 10:10

@Daniel not 6 months, maybe 3 or so. have not gotten around to loading latest, but I suspect the trends and affected users still hold
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wafflesMar 19 '10 at 11:42

2

It totally ignores that upvotes != reputation. If you get many votes on a day that doesn't translate into equally much reputation. Also community wiki posts (which are often highly upvoted), are probably not accounted for correctly.
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sthMar 19 '10 at 12:51

Wow, I'm number three among 10k+ users? Even still, it looks like I only stand to lose 1010 rep, which keeps me over 10k. Now, on Meta, I stand to lose a lot more...
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KipMar 19 '10 at 13:49

This makes a lot of sense; I've seen a user with over 7000 rep, with less then 30 upvoted answers. The majority of this rep (6k) is from questions. Many of them showing a complete lack of effort on the users part.

i agree. on SO, questions will come naturally, but answers need to be encouraged. on Meta, it's kind of the opposite: good feature request ideas or good bug finds should be rewarded, while the "answers" are just discussion that will happen naturally
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KipMar 19 '10 at 13:54

I'm bummed out that I'm days away from 10k on Meta. It was in sight.
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Lance RobertsMar 19 '10 at 16:52

1

+1 On meta, upvotes on answers ("Yes, I agree") worth less than questions.
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LeakyCodeMar 19 '10 at 17:28

2

I disagree; good discussions and feature requests on meta tend to be rewarded with a lot of upvotes, so applying the same change here should not have a calamatous effect on reputation. (Keep in mind there are still lots of n00b questions here too, which do deserve to be affected the same as on SO.)
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EtherMar 19 '10 at 17:58

By my count, I'm about to lose 710 rep on SO here, which knocks me down a level in terms of what I can do on the site (bye-bye, editing!). I, too, laboured under the impression that asking good questions -- providing the impetus to other users to provide answers -- was a desirable thing. I can't say that I'm against the change as a whole, but I'm not a fan of the recalculation that's coming with it.

I've asked a few questions that have tons of views and that people seem to find a real use for, over and over again. How is it that those are suddenly less valuable?

For what it's worth -- and given that there's been a blog posting about it already I'd say that it's not worth a lot -- I don't like this.

Asking question is desirable and looking through some of yours, you've done a decent job (much better than me, I suck at asking), but consider this as "they were overvalued before" rather than "suddenly less valuable now". If it's any consolation, you might not miss editing others' posts, since you haven't done it in over 3 months (based on your activity tab; there's one retag, but you'll still be able to do that), and -710 puts you about 100 shy of 2k, so you could make that back up in a single day if you wanted it back.
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GnomeMar 19 '10 at 14:02

1

How are you managing this super-fast data mining? Is there a toolset I should be aware of? That's pretty cool stuff!
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Chris RMar 19 '10 at 16:30

There is: you can work with the public data dumps and various sites run by ordinary users (using the data dumps), but I've not bothered to get into that (yet) and just used your profile as raven mentioned.
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GnomeMar 19 '10 at 20:15

Wow, that was pretty quick. I did much the same thing, but doing so from the activity tab seemed painfully slow. I was hoping there was a generic toolkit for making that sort of query.
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Chris RMar 22 '10 at 14:51

I'm in favour of this simply because it means we will finally see a global rep recalc. I'm often frustrated when I delete bad questions with upvoted answers and know that those users will get to keep their rep, because recalcs aren't done often enough (or ever) for most users.

PS. Thank you Jeff for the much more positive tone of conversation on this thread vs. that other one.

asking questions is useful, but not as useful as answering. That's the dynamic we're trying to capture. And yes, it involves a bit of sacrifice from every user (including myself) except those who never asked any questions. Freaks! :)
–
Jeff Atwood♦Mar 19 '10 at 12:22

3

@Jeff, being a moderator it doesn't really affect you (in regards to abilities at least)
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jmfsgMar 19 '10 at 12:40

8

@ashh: sorry if this sounds harsh, but you care way too much about rep. You're at about 15k now; -10% would put you at 13.5k. This means that a) you would not lose any privileges whatsoever, and b) judging by your rep graph you would recoup the loss in 10-14 days. In my humble opinion, that's not a big deal. Especially considering the fact that everyone's rep would get recalculated, not just yours, so you would probably even stay on the 9th page in the Users tab rather than drop to the 10th.
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ЯegDwightMar 19 '10 at 12:41

2

It's not punishment, it's just a different way of looking at reputation. As a bonus to the answers on a question, one still gets 5 rep for each upvote!
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ArjanMar 19 '10 at 12:45

@Jeff, questions are what draws googlers to SO
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Lance RobertsMar 19 '10 at 16:53

@RegDwight, doesn't sound harsh at all because you have misunderstood my concerns. The point is that only people who have actually asked questions are affected, and the more questions asked, the bigger the effect. It is the reduced recognition of the effort I have put into my questions that I am/was concerned about, not any loss of privileges. But I'm sure I'll get over it.
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user135186Mar 22 '10 at 5:31

@Jeff, it's your (very useful) site so who am I to complain. But if you're looking to stop problem users such as Shore and Gold, I'm not sure why it must be applied to all users. In reality it smells like a philosophical change, so why not just say so, rather than pointing to problem users as a reason.
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user135186Mar 22 '10 at 5:41

@ashh, I understand your point perfectly well, but you seem to miss that it's not actually your point, but rather the whole point of the rep recalc as such. You say that "only people who have actually asked questions are affected, and the more questions asked, the bigger the effect", but you miss that that's precisely the intention. The "reduced recognition of the effort [you] put into [your] question" is not an accidental byproduct of the change, it's the sole reason for the change. Your questions are valued less, thus your rep is decreased; not the other way round.
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ЯegDwightMar 22 '10 at 11:15

@Lance: and answers are what keep them comming back.
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AnonJrMar 22 '10 at 13:33

@RegDwight, Your essays on the (supposed) shortcomings in my points wonderfully demonstrate that, in fact, you care far more about reputation than I ever could or will. Your "humble opinion" indeed.
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user135186Mar 23 '10 at 7:15

@ashh: I am not the one complaining here about losing a tiny amount of rep using pompous wording. I am merely addressing such a complaint of yours. If you don't wish your complaints to be addressed, there is no point in posting them.
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ЯegDwightMar 23 '10 at 10:46

@regdwight glass is half full -- your answers are worth more than they were before. Particularly since accepts and bounties -- both answer related functions -- are 100% immune to rep cap now.
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Jeff Atwood♦Mar 28 '10 at 5:50

@S.Mark: The bad part is, some of those folks will be innocent. That is the big advantage that the increased downvote would have had: leaving the question heavy users who haven't accumulated a lot of ill will lightly touched.
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dmckeeMar 19 '10 at 3:18

2

skeet will probably be fine--if he's easily hitting the rep limit every day, any rep he loses on question votes will likely be made up for with answer votes that used to be beyond the limit, so that he'll still hit the same rep cap most days.
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KipMar 19 '10 at 13:52

@S.Mark That would be affects. Effects is usually a noun. It can be a verb, but not in the way you're using it. Your construction would be valid if the recalc was creating posts. /grammarnazi
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waiwai933Mar 20 '10 at 1:38

I don't really know how the recalc process is @fre
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jmfsgMar 19 '10 at 14:42

6

It kind of "simulates" your whole history again, from the moment you registered as a user, so yes, the rep cap is taken into consideration.
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fretjeMar 19 '10 at 15:02

We'll probably see a decrease in Mortarboard badges being awarded for a while, as some of those badges will retroactively become invalid (and so the next time a user earns one, it takes the place of the one that shouldn't have been earned previously). I can't think of any other badges that will be affected, though - no others use reputation as opposed to votes in their calculations. Then again, perhaps not, as most MB recipients are reaching the cap via answers rather than questions.
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EtherMar 19 '10 at 18:11

That is not true @Ether, badges are never removed when you recalc.
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jmfsgMar 19 '10 at 18:15

@Downvoter: I realize they aren't removed, which is why I said we might see a decrease in new badges for a while: some MB badges will be rendered "invalid", which means that the next time you earn a real one, it will take the place of the illegitimate one you already had.
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EtherMar 19 '10 at 18:27

oh, I get it, i think you're right. Jeff said the process returns "how many badges you should have" and compares it with what you have, and awards them. I stand corrected. @eth
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jmfsgMar 19 '10 at 18:31

From my understanding of this (& the related blog post) it's partly to motivate increased voting for answers, rather than questions.
Isn't this contradictory to the aims of the electorate badge - which seems to encourage voting for questions?

The value of asking the right questions for me is as valuable than the right answers, more valuable, actually. You can't attach an answer to nutt'n. Thank goodness for the folks who took the time to ask the same question I had about something or other.

In the interest of full disclosure, the majority of my rep comes from asking questions, as well as "residual" rep increases. That puts me in a different class from the Jon Skeets of the world obviously, but the questions are at least as much what puts SO on the (search engine) map as the answers. I try to imagine what SO means to devs that have no interest whatsoever in participating in SO and just want answers via Google or Bing.

This isn't necessarily directed at me (or so I hope... Jeff did say that the list that I was fifth on looked about right)

That said, it's really difficult for me to not feel penalized when I lose 20% of my reputation and probably get knocked out of the top 100. I like stackoverflow because it's a place where I really feel that learning is encouraged. And I personally love learning. I'll probably still get a big portion of my upvotes from asking questions.

I understand the decision. However, it's difficult not to feel discouraged though as my favorite part of using stack overflow will now essentially be considered to be half as important as the other part.

At least give me some kind of consolation here. Maybe a new gold badge of some kind? A top 20 question asker list? Heck, I'd even go for an increase to the bonus I get for accepting answers.

EDIT: I suppose the rep recalc didn't have as huge an effect as I thought it would. I'm still not convinced that this is the best course of action, but I can live with it I suppose.

Ok, I know it's a little bit late, I just wanted to say what I think :
The problem is that this will discourage old users of SO to ask questions. By "old users" I mean people that had eventually red the FAQ and that are possibly interested in earning rep thous will take care of the way they write their questions. But it will not discourage any one with no reputation at all to ask a i-have-nothing-to-loose question.
Thous this will possibly degrade the overall quality of the questions, and since I don't agree that much that A are twice as valuable as a Q, I don't think it is such a good idea.
I guess we'll see.